A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s

Abstract

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the “get tough” era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.

Introduction

Punishment changed in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century. The indicators of this change are well-documented and widely agreed upon. Prison populations soared, correctional and rehabilitative goals were largely supplanted in official and popular discourse by concerns with public safety and victims' rights, penal policy became highly politicized, and public sentiment toward criminals hardened. As a consequence, criminal punishment touched the lives of more Americans than ever before in the 1990s, a decade characterized by “mass imprisonment” (Garland 2001), “hyper-incarceration” (Simon 2000), and a “macho penal economy” (Downes 2001). Commentators continue to debate the broader meanings and sources of these changes. For some they signal the rise of a postmodern or “new penology” rooted in neoliberalism and distinguished by “an abandonment of any pretext of benevolence” (Pratt 2000:133). Others see not an overarching, novel trend, but disparate efforts to recombine timeworn practices in the face of the disintegration of the welfare state (Garland 1995), or an incoherent and contradictory penality driven by New Right politics that favors both the innovative and the nostalgic (O'Malley 1999).

Implicit in many of these analyses is the assumption that shifts in penal ideologies, discourses, and logics have consequences for prisoners' lives. Recently, Simon articulated this assumption when he asked, “[h]ow has inmate society changed under conditions where prisons' populations have experienced extraordinary growth and prison management has undergone a wholesale rearrangement of mission and ideology?” (2000:302). In this article, we address this question by examining the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of criminal punishment. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the “get tough” era. The gendered maternal and therapeutic approaches that gave women's corrections a certain coherence and distinctiveness for much of the twentieth century contrast sharply with both the punitive, pessimistic penal ideologies of the 1990s and the move to standardize and systematize penal practices. Have the ways women manage their lives in prison changed as prisons have moved toward gender-equity and a “penality of cruelty” (Simon 2001)? Convicted offenders, as Garland has noted, “form the most immediate audience for the practical rhetoric of punishment, being directly implicated within its practices and being the ostensible target of its persuasive attempts” (1990:262). Our goal is to shed light on the extent to which changes in the official discourses, ideology, and practices of penality have altered how imprisonment was experienced by women offenders, one segment of this “most immediate audience.”

Relationships Among Ideologies, Practices, and Experiences of Imprisonment

Why Expect Changes in the Experience of Imprisonment?

A major theme in prison research is that the experience of imprisonment—the ways prisoners think about and relate to other prisoners, to their keepers, and to the prison regime—is affected by prisons' external and internal environments. With shifts in the political, cultural, and economic climate of the larger society, the relationship of prisons to society as well as the relations of actors within the prison change (Jacobs 1977; Clemmer 1950; Sykes 1958). Similarly, official regimes, structures, and practices inside prisons shape the responses and adaptations of prisoners (Adams 1992; Bottoms 1999; Grusky 1959; Sparks, Bottoms, & Hay 1996; Street, Vinter, & Perrow 1966). Men's prisons provide conspicuous and well-documented examples of differences over time and among prisons in the experience of imprisonment, such as ebbs and flows in prison riots, the expansion of prison gangs, and trends in prisoner litigation (e.g., Adler & Longhurst 1994; Colvin 1992; Cummins 1994; Silberman 1995). Research on women in prison, though less extensive, also provides evidence of such variation. For example, aggressive behavior, self-harm, collective political action, involvement in prison families, and distrust of other prisoners appear to vary over time and among women's prisons with different regimes (Rierden 1997; Mandaraka-Sheppard 1986; Diaz-Cotto 1996; Greer 2000).

Fox's (1982, 1984) study of the Bedford Hills, New York, high-security prison for women is one of the few to systematically describe such changes in one institution over time. Using documentary data for the years 1970 through 1980, and interviews with women at Bedford Hills in 1972 and 1978, Fox linked external events and alterations in the prison's operations to changes in women's relations to other prisoners and to the prison. Through the influence of the prisoners' rights and feminist movements, prisoners became more politicized and litigious, their relations with staff grew more adversarial, and the traditional prisoner social system decreased in importance as women's involvement in kinship groups and other close personal relationships declined. “What was once appropriately characterized as a cooperative and caring community,” Fox concludes, “has slowly evolved into a more dangerous and competitive prison social climate” (1982:205). In his analysis of the redevelopment of Holloway Prison in England, Rock (1996) also describes how the social world of women prisoners at Holloway was reshaped by myriad influences, including “the formation and transformation of official typifications of deviant women” (1996:11), changes in the architecture and iconography of the prison, and the shifting balance among competing disciplinary modes.

According to this body of work, changes in the expectations that the public holds for its prisons and that prisons hold for their charges, in the ways offenders are defined, and in the techniques prisons use to accomplish their goals ought to alter how prisoners relate to the prison, the staff, and other prisoners (Pratt 2002). These features of the penal landscape have been realigned since the mid-twentieth century, according to analyses of large-scale trends in criminal punishment. As Simon and Feeley describe them, the major changes in imprisonment include the rejection of rehabilitative and normalizing goals, a growing emphasis on managerial goals and actuarial techniques to efficiently classify and contain what is seen as an essentially irredeemable population, and a concomitant de-emphasis of individualized interventions based on clinical knowledge (Feeley & Simon 1992; Simon 1993; Simon & Feeley 1995). In their version of the “new penology,” prison staff are no longer expected to develop affective relations and open communication with prisoners for either therapeutic purposes or the prisoners' moral improvement. Instead, prisoners are related to as rational, economic actors who have freely (albeit irresponsibly) chosen to commit crime—and likely will continue to do so. Among the consequences of this “new penology” are enormous growth in the prison population and reduction in prison programs, services, and amenities.

Some analysts question the extent to which a new or postmodern penology emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century, but most agree that both public and criminal justice administrators lowered their expectations about what imprisonment could accomplish and the extent to which offenders could be reformed (Bottoms 1995; Garland 1995, 2001; Pratt 2002; Rose 2000; Zimring & Hawkins 1995). For criminal justice officials operating in a neoliberal climate, transferring the responsibility of rehabilitation from the prison onto prisoners made both political and fiscal sense (Garland 1996; O'Malley 1992). And for prison administrators faced with demands for rationality and accountability, producing behavioral conformity among prisoners rather than transforming their attitudes and morals assumed priority (DiIulio 1987; Simon 2000).

Although such discursive and ideological trends in late-twentieth-century imprisonment have received considerable scholarly attention, whether and how these changes may have influenced the experience of imprisonment have not. We can, however, turn to classic and more contemporary research on prison social organization for insights into how different prison environments shape prisoners' adaptations. Some of this research indicates that in prisons with stricter disciplinary and operational regimes, an emphasis on custody rather than treatment, and physically harsher environments, prisoners tend to hold more defiant attitudes toward the institution and its staff, choose more individualistic forms of adaptation, and report greater allegiance to a collective prisoner social order. By contrast, in more treatment-oriented and less bureaucratic institutions, prisoners tend to form stronger primary group associations and more collaborative relationships with staff (Berk 1966; Grusky 1959; Mandaraka-Sheppard 1986; Pollack 1986; Street, Vinter, & Perrow 1966; Wilson 1968). Thus, to the extent that prisons have become more austere, more concerned with their security functions and with prisoners as an aggregate rather than as individuals, and where they have assigned greater responsibility for rehabilitation to offenders, prisoners may well be more distrustful of and alienated from the prison and its staff, more self-reliant, and more supportive of a prisoner-based normative system. Fox's (1982, 1984) findings support these predictions, while highlighting how moves toward standardization, rationalization, and gender equity in corrections have compounded these effects for women, encouraging what he characterizes as more traditionally “masculine” styles of adaptation to imprisonment.

Why Expect Continuity in the Experience of Imprisonment?

There are reasons to temper these expectations about changes in the prison experience. Prisons have always been sites in which multiple and competing goals and rationales are expressed (Cressey 1959; Giallombardo 1966; Pratt 2002). The goals and rationales in ascendance in the late twentieth century were not novel, although the political context in which they were deployed may have been (Garland 1990; O'Malley 1999). The knowledges guiding punishment often become corrupted and compromised in practice and have unforeseen consequences (Garland 1997:199), and practices developed under different technologies of power coexist and recombine as these technologies shift (Feeley & Simon 1994; Hannah-Moffat 2001).

This is perhaps best illustrated by front-line workers. What have been called “the practical complexities of governance” (Valverde 1998:11) often demand a creativity and flexibility that undermine or ignore more abstract discourses and official goals (see also Sutton 1997). Lynch's (1998, 2000) research on parole agents and Haney's (1996) study of juvenile justice workers show how objectives articulated at a state or regional level can be dismantled at the point of contact with clients as workers pursue more immediate individual and organizational ends. In his discussion of why recent penal trends are not best thought of as postmodern, Garland therefore cautions that

[t]he rapid changes manifest at the level of government representations and rhetoric must not be mistaken for alterations in working practices and professional ideologies, nor should it be assumed that the discrediting of a particular vocabulary (such as “rehabilitation”) means that the practices that it once described have altogether disappeared. (1995:204)

Moreover, prisoners are likely to manage their lives in prison not so much according to abstract logics and rationalities of power, or formally stated goals of the prison, but instead through pragmatic rules and habits of doing time. To the extent that these rules and habits reflect basic institutional needs (e.g., for predictability, order, self-maintenance), fundamental features of imprisonment (e.g., loss of freedom, exclusion from the wider society, control over one's body and time, material and legal deprivations), and inherent tensions and contradictions between the goals and practices of imprisonment, the prison experience will likely have at least a core of dreary consistency.

In addition, the discourses and techniques associated with women's imprisonment may be particularly resistant to the types of changes described above. From its inception, imprisonment has been practiced and justified in different ways for women and men (Bosworth 2000; Rafter 1990; Zedner 1995; Freedman 1981). Assumptions about the nature of the raw materials for women's prisons—criminal women—and about their ideal end products—normatively feminine women—have tended to both soften the regimes imposed upon women and deny women's prisons certain resources.¹

Female offenders have generally been seen as more reformable, or at least more tractable, than male offenders; and the female psyche and body have been constructed in ways that have naturalized gender-specific efforts to control and normalize women. Since the late 1970s, a parity movement in the United States, while launching equal-protection lawsuits to remedy some of the inequities faced by women in prison, has also reinforced claims about women prisoners' distinctive life circumstances and special needs (Rafter 1990). As a consequence of obdurate ideological notions of gender, women's imprisonment may therefore still be “marked by significant continuities in forms and ideologies” (Bosworth 2000:265), and these may weaken the extent to which punitive discourses and practices can penetrate women's prisons.

As a consequence of these features of women's imprisonment, there may be considerable continuity in how women experience and respond to imprisonment. This expectation is supported by evidence from classic and contemporary research on women in prison. In the women's prisons studied since the 1960s, violence, gangs, and overt racial tensions are unusual; intimate and consensual sexual relationships and prison families are common; and relatively cooperative relations with staff predominate (Ward & Kassebaum 1965; Giallombardo 1966; Heffernan 1972; Owen 1998; Rierden 1997; Genders & Player 1990; Bosworth 1999; Girshick 1999). Order and compliance, as Bosworth (1996) notes, are rarely threatened; resistance is typically covert and individual, rather than collective. These studies suggest that some aspects of the ways women choose to do their time may be anchored in basic needs for a measure of comfort and control in a highly restrictive and depriving environment, and that these may vary little with changes in penal ideologies or a prison's regime.

The Research Setting

Our examination of continuity and change in women's prison experiences is situated in California, a “bellwether state” (Clear 1994:54) in both the rehabilitative movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the “get tough” movement of the 1980s and 1990s. California was one of the first states to wholeheartedly embrace the post–World War II medical-rehabilitative model of prison management, but it was also “among the first to repudiate that vision” in the 1970s (Simon 1993:13; see also Abramsky 2002). With the passage of the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act in 1976, punishment officially replaced rehabilitation as the stated purpose of incarceration. Subsequent years saw the hardening of public sentiment toward criminals and the politicization of penal policy (Field Institute, various years; Zimring, Hawkins, & Kamin 2001), culminating in approval of Proposition 184, the “three strikes” law, in 1994. During the 1980s and 1990s, California's prison growth put it “in a class by itself,” not just nationally but internationally (Zimring & Hawkins 1994:83). This growth was at least as great for women's prisons as it was for men's. Between 1960 and 1995, the number of women in California state prisons grew tenfold, from approximately 800 to more than 8,000, and the number of women's prisons increased from one to four. With the opening of the state's second women's prison in 1987 and the passage of equal rights legislation, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) accelerated efforts to bring its women's prisons into compliance with the rules and regulations governing the state's prisons for men. For official purposes, by the 1990s California's female and male prisoners were recognized as essentially equal and deserving of the same treatment.

In what follows, we describe the practices and experiences of imprisonment at CIW in the early 1960s, when it was the sole prison for women in California, and in the mid-1990s, when it was surpassed in size by the two newest prisons for women 300 miles north in the state's Central Valley. We first compare official discourses, expectations, and practices at CIW in the two periods. What did prison officials say they were trying to accomplish, and how did they intend to accomplish these ends? What were their assumptions and expectations about the women they imprisoned? We then compare how prisoners at CIW responded to imprisonment in the early 1960s and the mid-1990s. How did they view the prison, its mission, and the staff assigned to carry it out? How did they manage their lives and their relations with other prisoners? These comparisons will allow us to evaluate, within the context of one women's prison, two perspectives on the implications of macro-level shifts in penality for the micro-level experience of imprisonment: one predicting that women prisoners' experiences will have been profoundly reshaped by changes in penal ideology and discourse, and one predicting that their experiences will have a continuity generated by both the pragmatics of institutional life and the distinctive history and philosophy of women's imprisonment.

Doing Research at the CIW in the 1960s and the 1990s

In the early 1960s at CIW, David Ward and Gene Kassebaum, two sociologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted one of the first sociological studies of women's imprisonment (Ward & Kassebaum 1965). The purpose of their research was to determine (1) whether female prisoner types were similar to those found among male prisoners, and (2) how various roles structuring the female prison community were related (Ward & Kassebaum 1963:3). Because very little was known about women's prison experiences, the research team initially carried out semistructured interviews with 45 prisoners, some selected to provide variation on criminal history, others chosen because they held positions of relative power and prestige in the prison. The women, 30 of whom were interviewed twice, were asked to reflect on “the major problems of confinement and the general inmate behavior patterns” at CIW (Ward & Kassebaum 1963:5). Based on these interviews, a survey was designed and administered to a 50% random sample of CIW's prisoner population. Of the 314 women who reported to fill out the survey, 293 (42% of CIW's total population) completed it. The data from the interviews, the survey, and other sources served as the basis for Ward and Kassebaum's book, Women's Prison: Sex and Social Structure (1965).²

In 1994, we were given access to much of the data collected by Ward and Kassebaum, including aggregated, descriptive data from their survey; publications from and documents on CIW; working drafts of their book; and notes from their interviews with 24 women. Information on the backgrounds of these interviewees unfortunately was not systematically recorded in the notes to which we had access. However, we do know that at least seven were white and one was an African American, their ages ranged from 18 to at least 47, at least eight had been regular users of drugs (primarily heroin), and at least six had been involved in the sex trade. Of those we have information on, two were in prison for the first time and nine reported prior commitments; sentences ranged between one indeterminate sentence of six months to 14 years and several life sentences; time spent at CIW on the current commitment ranged from one week to three years. The crimes for which the women were serving time included murder (at least one woman), robbery (at least one woman), incorrigibility (at least one teenager), grand theft/forgery/bad checks (at least three women), narcotics violations (at least two), and narcotics or prostitution (at least five).

Paralleling Ward and Kassebaum, we began our research at CIW in 1995 by conducting interviews with a diverse group of women randomly selected from two lists provided by CIW. One listed women who had been serving time at CIW for at least five years, while the other listed women admitted within the last six months.³ Of the 50 women we selected, 36 were available on the days we scheduled interviews, and only four of these declined to participate.⁴ On a subsequent visit, we interviewed three more women, all of them members of the Women's Advisory Committee (WAC).⁵ Of the 35 women we interviewed, 15 were lifers, 23 were first-time commitments, 17 had served less than a year on their current sentences, 17 were serving time for violent offenses, ten were serving time for property offenses, and eight were serving time for drug offenses. Their ages ranged from 20 to 63; 18 were white, 11 were Hispanic, four were African American, and two were Native American. Interviews were conducted in private offices with no staff present and lasted between 30 and 90 minutes; all but seven were tape-recorded, and for these detailed notes were taken. We asked four open-ended questions about the difficulties of doing time, the ways women managed their time, and the nature of interactions and relationships among prisoners and with staff. We interviewed a few women a second or third time on subsequent visits to the prison. We also conducted open-ended interviews with 12 administrative staff and correctional officers at CIW in 1995, 1996, and 1998, during which we asked them the same types of questions we asked the prisoners, as well as questions about changes at CIW over time.⁶

Drawing on these interviews and on informal discussions with prisoners and some staff at CIW, we designed a survey that included a number of the questions asked by Ward and Kassebaum, as well as questions we had formulated.⁷ We discussed the survey's wording and content with several members of the WAC; WAC members also pretested the survey and helped us publicize it before we administered it. On one afternoon in July 1998, we personally distributed 1,224 surveys to the six main housing units and the secure housing unit (SHU) during the lockdown period before dinner. Staff were asked to give one survey to each woman, and the women were asked to return their surveys to the housing staff office in envelopes we had provided, after they were released for dinner. We then picked up the surveys from the units, 887 of which were returned completed and usable (a response rate of 72%).⁸

The Practices of Imprisonment at the CIW

CIW in the 1960s

When the original CIW, located at a remote site in central California, was devastated by an earthquake in 1952, its 380 prisoners were moved to a just-completed prison about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. Like its predecessor, CIW at Frontera was designed to “create a nonpunitive environment in which, it was believed, true rehabilitation could take place” (Bookspan 1991:86; see also Morales 1980). The site's rural isolation was expected to encourage ‘residents’⁹ to view the institution as a home, and to eliminate the need for walls, fences, and guard towers. By 1963, CIW at Frontera, with over 800 prisoners, had more than doubled its population to become the largest women's prison in the United States. It was also the only women's prison in California and so held convicted women of all types and custody classifications. The women were housed in single rooms in six housing units or ‘cottages’ arrayed around the central ‘campus.’

Prisoners were most closely supervised by women's correctional supervisors (WCSs), most of whom had college degrees and training in social work. Correctional counselors, also all female, were assigned to each housing unit and were expected to develop an individualized treatment program for each prisoner, in consultation with her and based on the results of psychological and scholastic tests. The only male staff the prisoners had regular contact with were medical, clinical, or religious professionals, such as the psychiatrist, physician, psychologist, and chaplain. Most of the remaining 220 employees were women, including CIW's superintendent, Iverne Carter, who lived in an apartment within the administration building.¹⁰ As part of the effort to encourage interactions between staff and prisoners and to foster a free-world feel, staff and prisoners wore street clothes instead of uniforms.

The daily lives of prisoners were regulated by a set of local institution rules (California Department of Corrections 1960) that subjected them to a somewhat more “benign” and generally less restrictive atmosphere than men in prison at the time (Zalba 1964:14). While subject to count three times a day, women could move around the prison with relative freedom. A minimum of four hours a day of work was required, either at jobs necessary to maintain the prison or in the garment factory. Women were also required to participate in twice-weekly “living group” problem-solving sessions in their cottages, and those younger than 55 were required to take a homemaking course. High-school courses; training in cosmetology, laundry, sewing, and quantity cooking; and group and individual counseling were also available on a voluntary basis, although the demand for individual therapy typically outstripped what the clinical staff could provide (Zalba 1964).

Prisoners' daily lives were also regulated through the use of indeterminate sentences. Release dates were set by the Board of Trustees of the Women's Parole Division, which had both sentencing and parole authority over adult female felons. Only after an initial appearance before the Board did prisoners know when they would be considered eligible for parole; their actual release could occur months or years after initial eligibility. Decisions to parole were based not just on the woman's crime, but on her behaviors and attitudes while in prison as well as on her participation in prison programs. Women convicted of the same crimes could therefore serve very different sentences, a practice justified in the name of rehabilitation and prisoners' need for individualized treatment.¹¹

CIW's administration viewed rehabilitation as its responsibility, but also as a formidable task because of what it saw as the inadequacies of both the prisoners and the resources available to the prison. In a 1963 issue of The Correctional Review, Superintendent Carter wrote that “[t]he challenge at CIW is to provide, with its limited means, resocialization for emotionally unstable, culturally dependent, physically and sometimes mentally ill women” (Carter 1963:12). Thus, the women at CIW were not seen as particularly dangerous, nor were they considered fully responsible for their circumstances. Rather they were “the rejected, the unwanted, the inadequate, the insecure” who “have been buffeted by fate” (California Department of Corrections 1957:21). CIW administrators also believed that their charges, as compared to male prisoners, “had different problems and consequently, they needed different treatment” (Ward & Kassebaum 1965:ix). These assumptions justified the use of a combination of at-times discordant methods to prepare the women to “assume various adult roles as a mother, a wife, or a self-supporting individual” (Buwalda 1963:14).

Along with the coercive power that derived from the system of indeterminate sentences, CIW also relied on maternal and therapeutic methods in its efforts at rehabilitation. Interactions between WCSs, or “matrons,” and the “girls,” as the prisoners were commonly referred to, were intended to model a nurturing maternal relationship. Training manuals encouraged the WCSs to develop relationships “of genuine professional interest, seasoned with warmth and friendliness” (California Department of Corrections 1957:21) and to present themselves as role models and confidants for prisoners. Like the ideal mother, each WCS also supervised prisoners' training in homemaking, deportment, dress, and grooming, and was expected to participate in the moral regulation of prisoners, particularly as this related to their sexuality.¹²

Therapeutic methods were also key to CIW's rehabilitative program. These methods assumed that prisoners would learn “responsible adult roles” not just by being trained in them, but by gaining “self-esteem, self-knowledge, and self-realization” through individual and group therapy (Cassel & Van Vorst 1961:22). Self-knowledge required sharing one's thoughts and feelings, as well as considerable personal information, with the psychiatrist and psychologist on staff. But individual evaluation and intervention by professionals were only one element of the therapeutic approach. In group therapy and living-group sessions, prisoners were expected not just to take responsibility for their own behaviors but also to demand the same of other prisoners; as in other therapeutic communities, peer-group pressure was seen as an important tool in the rehabilitative enterprise (California Department of Corrections 1962).

Tensions between the therapeutic and maternal strategies that coexisted at CIW were apparent to at least some of the staff. May Buwalda, CIW's assistant superintendent, blamed what she called CIW's “protective” and “parent decision-making role” for creating a “child-adult culture” at the prison (Buwalda 1963:14). This culture, which encouraged “handling problems with just sympathy, arbitrary decisions, or a ‘pill’ prescription” (Buwalda 1963:14), was in her view antithetical to learning personal responsibility in a group culture. Buwalda also worried that easy adjustment to the prison's domestic regime was probably a predictor of “repeated failures in assuming socially acceptable roles in the community” (Buwalda 1963:14). Other evidence suggests that staff were also aware, at least at some level, of the conflict between the softer, more feminized disciplinary techniques they were expected to rely on and the coercive techniques that underpinned these. For example, when male correctional officers—the only staff allowed to use physical force on prisoners—were issued tear gas equipment, female staff “reacted with giggles and lack of interest in handling the weapons…. Our impression is that female staff members willingly delegate these [coercive control] responsibilities which are inconsistent with their roles as ladies” (Ward & Kassebaum 1965:8).

For prisoners at CIW in 1963, then, the administration held a wide-ranging and not entirely consistent set of expectations. At a time when official discourse expressed considerable optimism about the prison's capacity to rehabilitate, being a good prisoner at CIW meant many things. One should be normatively feminine in behavior, appearance, manner, and attitude, but not overly dependent on the institution. One should have an attitude of openness to staff and other prisoners, as a means to self-knowledge, and through peer pressure should encourage other prisoners to acquire their own self-knowledge. Compliance with prison rules was important, but compliance without attitude change was insufficient; and compliance that came too easily could signal weakness or immaturity. These were exacting expectations for women viewed as inadequate and unstable, and they encouraged the use of at times discordant methods. Maternal and therapeutic approaches coexisted, albeit uneasily and within the shadow cast by the prison's punitive and coercive capacities. However, these capacities went largely unacknowledged in official discourse because they were antagonistic to the goal of creating a nonpunitive, rehabilitative environment.

CIW in the 1990s

In 1995, CIW's physical plant looked much the same as it had in the 1960s, although a perimeter fence reinforced with razor wire and four towers staffed with armed guards had been added. The most obvious change at CIW was the increased size of the prisoner population: in 1995, CIW incarcerated about 1,665 women, twice as many as in 1963. Although three other prisons for women had been built, the state did not differentiate them according to security classification as it did its men's prisons. As a consequence, CIW still held prisoners of all security levels. They were housed two to a cell, required to wear state-issued clothing (denim jeans and T-shirts, or muumuus), and were referred to as inmates, not residents.

While no longer mandated by law, CIW was still headed by a woman, although her title had changed from superintendent to warden. Equal rights legislation had altered the composition of staff working in the housing units and other positions requiring regular contact with prisoners. Of the 320 or so uniformed custody staff, half were males, and many previously had worked in men's prisons. CIW no longer provided its own specialized training; instead, its correctional officers, like those at other state prisons, were drawn from the state's training academy and were members of one of the state's largest unions. According to some staff we spoke with, these changes had lead to greater distance and detachment in staff relations with prisoners.

In 1995, CIW was governed not by local institution rules, but by Title 15 of the California Code of Regulations. The shift from the rehabilitative model to a managerial model is apparent from the CDC's list of the seven major functions of its prisons, a list which began with custody, classification, and case record management; education and other prisoner services were at the bottom of the list (California Department of Corrections 1994:11–12). Group counseling and individual therapy were no longer required of prisoners at CIW, and the few groups offered were run either by volunteers from the community or by the prisoners themselves. A drug treatment program, limited to those within six months of release, had space for only 120 prisoners¹³ and a long waiting list. While vocational training had expanded to include word and data processing, electronics, and plumbing, work opportunities were also limited: more than one-third of the prisoners were “involuntarily unassigned” to jobs and therefore unable to earn half-time credits.

With the abolition of both indeterminate sentencing and the separate parole division for women, CIW had lost an important instrument for regulating prisoners' behaviors.¹⁴ Unlike in the 1960s, in the 1990s most prisoners—with the exception of those serving life sentences—were informed of their release dates when they entered prison. Only life sentences continued to be indeterminate sentences, and lifers remained subject to the parole board's discretion in setting release dates.¹⁵ However, with the opening of three other prisons for women, CIW's administration had gained a new control mechanism: the threat of transfer. Administrators told us they hoped to turn CIW into an “informal level two or ‘soft’ level three¹⁶ institution” by transferring “troublemakers” to one of the newer prisons, which were built according to a prototype used for men's prisons and rumored by prisoners to be stricter and “military-like.”¹⁷ In this sense, administrators were subverting the official policy of not differentiating women's prisons by security classification. However, they were doing so not through statistically based risk assessment tools—one of the hallmarks of Feeley and Simon's (1992) new penology—but rather through subjective and personalistic assessments about the types of women they wanted at CIW.¹⁸

Despite the obvious de-emphasis of rehabilitation in CDC publications and documents, in the mid-1990s CIW's administration still talked about rehabilitation as a goal of imprisonment. But in contrast to the 1960s, in the 1990s rehabilitation had become an individual, not an institutional responsibility. As Warden Susan Poole said to us in 1995, “We're not rehabilitating anyone. We're creating an atmosphere in which women can change themselves…. We have a culture of responsibility here.” Thus, CIW's work, educational, vocational, and volunteer programs were offered as ways for women to “empower” themselves,¹⁹ boost their self-esteem, and accept personal responsibility for their lives in order to change them. The prisoner was no longer expected to rely on clinical experts to design her route to rehabilitation but had become a rational actor, “an agent in his [sic] own rehabilitation, and…an entrepreneur of his [sic] own personal development” (Garland 1996:42).²⁰

Poole's emphasis on personal responsibility was in keeping with official and popular discourse on imprisonment and the neoliberal environment of the 1990s. However, her belief that women could best learn this responsibility in a prison context, modeled after a therapeutic community and attentive to women's distinctive needs, harkened back to the 1960s. Her personal style and approach to her job did so as well, at least in some respects. Similar to the superintendents and matrons of CIW's early years, Poole presented herself as a role model for prisoners, as someone who, having used life's adversities to become stronger, could motivate her charges to do the same. Her efforts to encourage prisoners to personally identify with her recalled those of female prison reformers and administrators who sought to establish a “woman's regime” at CIW in the 1950s (Morales 1980). Thus, CIW's warden, while embracing elements of the penal ideology of the 1990s, also drew on more traditional gendered discourses and techniques in her work. As we noted earlier, this blending of ostensibly contradictory rationalities and relations of power also characterized CIW in the 1960s, as it has women's prisons in other times and places (Rafter 1990; Hannah-Moffat 2001).

Our interviews with other administrative staff and front-line workers at CIW indicated that, like Warden Poole, many of them took an eclectic approach to their jobs, an approach that balanced system-wide, official concerns over accountability, efficiency, and public safety against their own sense of women's particular needs and natures and, specifically, the character of women at CIW. Like their 1960s counterparts, staff we spoke to tended to see female prisoners not as particularly dangerous or deserving of punishment, but as generally inadequate, weak, emotionally needy, and dysfunctional. Efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to demonize certain types of female offenders, particularly drug users (e.g., Gomez 1997; Campbell 2000), were not strongly reflected in the views of CIW's staff. Similar to Ward and Kassebaum's portrayal of women at CIW as “criminally immature” (1965:53), CIW staff in the mid-1990s blamed women's criminal involvement on their relationships with criminal men, their susceptibility to drug addiction, and their histories of physical and sexual abuse. While state law might treat female and male prisoners as equal, CIW staff rarely saw them that way. As one senior administrator told us, “95% of the women here wouldn't try to escape if you took away the fences.”

Given the official stance that rehabilitation was the prisoner's responsibility and the prevailing view among staff that women at CIW suffered from numerous deficiencies, it is not surprising that staff held generally low expectations for the women and for what the prison could accomplish. This pessimism may also have been fed by the contrast between the rational actor assumed by the rhetoric of “responsibilization” (O'Malley 1992; Simon 1994) and what staff saw as the emotionally unstable character of the prisoner population. What staff strove for, then, was neither normalization nor remolding of women's psyches but behavioral conformity within the prison, a less ambitious and more immediate goal oriented toward institutional needs.²¹

The temporal differences we have described in penal objectives and policies in California and in penal practices at CIW are easily interpreted as evidence of some of the macro-level shifts in criminal punishment highlighted by scholars such as Feeley and Simon. Compared to the 1960s, CIW in the 1990s imprisoned more women in a more apparently prison-like and impersonal setting; its programs were oriented less toward individualized treatment, normalization, and rehabilitation; and it regulated prisoners according to more bureaucratic and gender-neutral policies. CIW's goals had narrowed and shifted toward organizational ends of security and order; as such, it expected less from its prisoners and from itself.

Despite these changes, there were important continuities in the practices of imprisonment. Rehabilitation figured in official discourse at both times; the 1990s neoliberal ideology was not opposed to people rehabilitating themselves, nor was the correctionalist ideology of the 1960s incompatible with taking personal responsibility for one's rehabilitation. In both periods, an eclectic mix of disciplinary modes and control techniques was available and drawn on to serve officially stated goals as well as more pragmatic institutional purposes. Moreover, imprisonment at CIW remained gendered in a number of respects. Because women prisoners in the 1990s, as in the 1960s, were not seen as particularly dangerous and disruptive, they did not need to be housed in prisons differentiated by security level, nor did staff need to be armed as they were in men's prisons. And administrators and staff still viewed prisoners at CIW as having distinctive needs and requiring different treatment from male prisoners. Ideological notions of gender differences, then, continued to play a role in how imprisonment was practiced at CIW and may have shielded it from greater infiltration by the penal ideologies and punitive discourses of the late twentieth century. What remains to be seen is whether and how these similarities and differences in penal discourse and practice were reflected in prisoners' experiences of imprisonment. Before turning to that analysis, we compare characteristics of women at CIW in the two periods and briefly note how changes in penal policies may have influenced these.

Characteristics of Prisoners at the CIW in the 1960s and 1990s

An important consequence of shifts in penal ideology in the last third of the twentieth century was not just growth in prison populations, but also a change in who was sent to prison. The characteristics of women at CIW in the 1960s and the 1990s in some respects reflect such change but in other respects do not. Table 1 presents information about the women at CIW in 1963 and 1998. Over time, the population at CIW became more ethnically diverse²² and older, and a larger proportion of women had never been married. These trends were not unique to women in prison but mirrored trends in the general female population in California. However, in the general population the percentage of women with minor children decreased over time, whereas at CIW this percentage increased somewhat. Women with children, then, were disproportionately affected by the expansion of incarceration. Regardless of time period, certain types of women—African Americans; women who were separated, divorced, or never married; and women with children—were overrepresented at CIW compared to the general female population.²³

Table 1. Characteristics of the Prison Population at CIW in 1963 and 1998

Sources: Data for 1963 on age, marital status, minor children, offense, and life sentence come from official prison records searched by Ward and Kassebaum (1965) and by Zalba (1964). Data for 1963 on race/ethnicity and time served come from population surveys conducted by Zalba. Data for 1998 all come from our survey of women at CIW.

The offenses that sent most women to CIW underwent a pronounced shift over time,²⁴ and in ways consistent with what would be expected from a combination of the war on drugs, increased concerns over violent crime, and a trend toward the use of alternative sanctions for minor property offenders. Between 1963 and 1998, proportionally fewer women were imprisoned for forgery and theft-related offenses, whereas more were imprisoned for violent crimes and drug law violations, trends not unique to California or even the United States (Kruttschnitt & Gartner 2003).²⁵ Women at CIW in the 1990s also had served more time on their current sentences, reflecting both increasing sentence lengths for violent and drug offenses as well as the relatively large number of lifers at CIW in the 1990s.²⁶ To the extent that changes in penal ideologies and policies sent both more and different types of women to prison in the 1990s, this could be reflected in differences in women's experiences of imprisonment in the 1990s compared to the 1960s, although we find little evidence for this possibility (see footnote 29). We move now to an examination of those experiences, drawing on survey data and interviews from both periods.

Women's Experiences of Imprisonment at CIW in the 1960s and 1990s

The central question we address in this section is: Given the similarities and differences in official discourses, goals, practices, and expectations at CIW in 1963 and 1998 described earlier, how did the prisoners manage their relations with each other and with staff, negotiate the constraints of the prison regime, and develop pragmatic rules and habits of doing time in the two periods? As outlined above, one answer to this question emphasizes change in the experience of doing time. More specifically, women serving time at CIW in the 1990s—a prison regime that emphasized custody and control, eschewed institutional responsibility for rehabilitation, and exposed women to a harsher and more unsparing regimen—might well have held more defiant attitudes toward the prison and its staff, identified more strongly with prisoners as a collective, and chosen more individualistic styles of doing time, compared to women at CIW in the 1960s. And women imprisoned at CIW in the 1960s—when maternal and therapeutic techniques predominated and when officials attempted to veil the prison's punitive power behind a rhetoric of rehabilitation—might have formed more intimate relationships with other prisoners and more collaborative relations with staff, compared to women at CIW in 1998.

An alternative answer asserts that continuity in women's experiences will be more apparent than change for a number of reasons. Among the more important of these are the “prison's overwhelming power to punish” (Carlen 1994:137) and the coexistence of a variety of similar logics and techniques of imprisonment even within seemingly different penal regimes. As a consequence of these features of imprisonment, the ways in which women did time may have been unmistakably marked by assumptions, constraints, and deprivations as common to CIW in the 1960s as to CIW in the 1990s.

To evaluate these hypotheses, we compare evidence from both the surveys and the interviews. From the surveys, we present women's responses to ten questions that tapped their views on other prisoners, prison staff, and ways to do time. While these data provide information from a fairly representative²⁷ and large number of prisoners (293 at CIW in 1963; 887 at CIW in 1998), they are limited in at least two ways. First, the number and range of questions we can compare are not as great as we would like. Because Ward and Kassebaum's research focus was somewhat different from ours, their survey included only a few questions relevant for the purposes of this article.²⁸ Second, what survives from Ward and Kassebaum's survey are aggregate, descriptive data only; thus we cannot conduct bi- or multivariate analysis on these responses to compare, for example, the characteristics of women who held certain views in 1963 and 1998. We can, however, compare the aggregated responses of women at CIW in the two periods to determine whether their views of other prisoners, of staff, and of doing time changed significantly over time. We also present evidence from our and Ward and Kassebaum's interviews relevant to the themes explored in the survey questions. Using the interview data, we can elaborate on and clarify the various dimensions of doing time and attend to the more subjective and emotional aspects of how women experienced their daily lives in and the routines of the prison.

Table 2 presents data on the percentage of women who agreed with ten statements about doing time, other prisoners, and prison staff. There are at least two interpretations of these results: one is consistent with the expectation that women's experiences of imprisonment changed over time, and the other highlights continuity in these experiences.²⁹ The former interpretation would point to the statistically significant differences in the support expressed for seven of the ten statements. The second interpretation would suggest that the data in Table 2 do not portray a picture of major transformation in how prisoners at CIW related to each other, to staff, or to the prison. Three statements receive identical or nearly identical levels of support; and differences in support for the other statements, while statistically significant, are primarily of degree and not kind—that is, women's attitudes did not so much shift in direction as coalesce toward greater consensus. To assess these two interpretations, we compare what women said about these aspects of doing time and their relations with others at the prison in interviews in the 1960s and the 1990s.

Table 2. Survey Data on Prisoners' Perceptions of Doing Time, of Other Prisoners, and of Staff at CIW

^* p<.05;

^*** p<.001.

Data for 1963 are from Ward and Kassebaum's survey of prisoners (1965); data for 1998 are from our survey of prisoners.

Relations with and Perceptions of Other Prisoners

By far the most common response, regardless of time period, to interview questions about the best way to do one's time and relate to other prisoners was a variant of the following: “Mind your own business. Stay to yourself. Have a few friends, but don't trust anyone.” The survey data suggest that these sentiments were not just confined to interviewees, but were widespread in the prisoner population. Across both periods, between 72 and 88% of the women surveyed agreed with the statements that minding one's own business and having little to do with other prisoners is the best way to do time and that doing time is easier when prisoners stick together, but that prisoners are not loyal when it really matters. These expressions of detachment from and distrust of other prisoners were elaborated on in the interviews, with the vast majority of women indicating that they preferred to limit the extent and nature of their contacts with other prisoners and did not expect loyalty from each other. A recent transfer from a youth facility, this 18-year-old “incorrigible” said of the other women at CIW in the 1960s: “I just like two or three friends, but you can trust no one…. Why should I be interested in others?” This view was shared by many others at CIW in the 1960s. For example, a 27-year-old who had served one year on a forgery charge said that “with a few exceptions” she did not “care much for the girls” at CIW; “…there's no love lost on either side.” Women who had several prior commitments to prison, such as the following two, were no more tolerant of other prisoners. One claimed that “everyone at CIW is crazy [inmates and staff],” but then noted that she had two friends inside. The other said, “I don't like to associate with any of them [prisoners], but need a few friends to talk to.” As these statements suggest, women did make friends with and at times trust other prisoners. For example, after three weeks at CIW in 1963, one lifer observed that “the girls aren't rough and tough. We can talk to each other, knowing it will go only that far.” Nevertheless, the predominant view of prisoners in the 1960s was succinctly captured by a 22-year-old who had done four months for selling marijuana: “I'll do my time and let others do theirs.”

Many of the women we interviewed at CIW in the 1990s expressed similar attitudes about relations with other prisoners. For example, two 50-something women in prison for the first time—one a previously homeless woman who had violated parole, the other a college graduate serving a life sentence for killing her husband—expressed caution toward, but not complete rejection of, other prisoners. The former said, “I've made a few friends, you know, but I don't really buddy up with ‘em too much.” According to the other woman, “There are a few other people in here I've met who I really like…but I'm talking about 2% of the people in here.” Several women we interviewed were, however, more illiberal in their views, as these excerpts indicate: “I've worked hard at projecting that I just don't give a shit, get away from me” (a lifer in her early 60s in prison for the first time); “…you make one friend, you know what I'm saying, out of all the people here and that friend turns out to be just as scandalous as the rest of them” (a 23-year-old African American woman serving two years for burglary); prisoners are “treacherous, dangerous, and out for themselves,” especially the younger ones, who “have no morals, no code, or anything they live by” (a 50-something white woman with eight previous commitments to prison); if you make a friend, “then when you least expect it they fuck your ass up, straight up” (a 32-year-old, college-educated, self-labeled crack addict).

Frustration over lack of loyalty among prisoners was a common complaint in both periods, but was more frequently and strongly voiced by women at CIW in the 1990s. Despite being keenly aware of how prison constrained and structured their own lives, prisoners in the 1990s tended to attribute the lack of solidarity not so much to the nature of imprisonment, but to the nature of women.³⁰ Women were perceived as essentially fickle at best, disloyal and conniving at worst, and unlikely ever to stand up for each other: “Women do not stand together in what's wrong and what's right…. A woman will turn against you in a heartbeat just because she has a PMS day” (a 40-year-old Latina serving life for killing her husband); “…we don't cooperate as a group to get things done. I think women don't want to lose their little creature comforts” (a 53-year-old African American woman who had served 13 years of a 15-life sentence); “Women don't [get organized]; they're pitiful about it. They're too busy getting jealous or upset about something” (a 38-year-old white woman who had done two years for check fraud). Essentializing notions of gender, then, shaped the ways in which women understood and interpreted their prison experience and their relations with other prisoners in both periods. But in the 1990s, women's more negative views of each other may also have mirrored the lowered expectations that their keepers held for them.

Not surprisingly, then, the majority of survey respondents in both periods disagreed with the statement that it is sometimes acceptable to inform on another prisoner. Virtually all the women interviewed expressed disdain for “snitches” and said that they had been schooled in the importance of turning a blind eye to the illicit activities of other prisoners, even if they were the target of these. A handful of women admitted that they had been hit or threatened by other prisoners but had not reported this to staff because, as one said, “then I would've got a snitch racket, you know, a jacket on me.” However, some women in both periods described circumstances that they felt justified informing—for example, if a prisoner was being beaten seriously by a group or if someone was using a dirty needle to tattoo prisoners. But for most others—such as this 30-something mother of eight doing time for prostitution at CIW in the 1960s—even if “someone is going to get hurt, you can tell another inmate, but never staff.”

What differed somewhat between the two periods were the reasons women thought snitching occurred and the reasons they disapproved of it; and these reflect differences both in penal regimes and in the extent of women's distrust of other prisoners. Women interviewed in the 1960s typically said that prisoners snitched because they thought that cooperating with staff would lead to an earlier release, or they identified more with staff than other prisoners, or they were “weekenders”—prisoners with very short sentences and therefore little commitment to other prisoners.³¹ The group-based aspect of the therapeutic program at CIW in the 1960s, which emphasized peer pressure and confrontation, was also blamed for discouraging solidarity among prisoners and encouraging women to collaborate with staff in policing other prisoners. Women in the 1960s most often disapproved of informing because they felt it made the staff's job too easy and blurred the line between prisoners and staff. As this 28-year-old white woman at CIW in 1963 said, snitching “helps the staff do their jobs. When they [prisoners] start that, they should get a badge and a paycheck.” In the 1990s, however, women were more likely to attribute snitching to a general lack of morals among prisoners; and their disapproval was directed more at the damage informing did to other prisoners. As this grandmother, a Latina serving time for embezzlement, said, “…if you say anything, you know, then everybody goes to jail…. So you just don't get into it, you just don't, you know?”

Although significantly more women in the 1990s refused to endorse informing on others, they were less likely, compared to women in the 1960s, to agree that sharing goods with other prisoners was a “good rule to follow.” This reflects, in part, a change in CDC rules curtailing the exchange of personal property among prisoners. As this Puerto Rican woman who had served 16 years on a 25-life sentence stated in 1995, “…now it's a little bit different. I share less…. It's in the DOM [Department Operations Manual]—we're not supposed to borrow each other's things.” But in addition, women at CIW in the 1990s expressed concern about the potential for conflict if one did share with others: “If you loan somebody something, it's hard for you to get it back. And the next thing you know, you're gonna be boxin' for it,” said a young African American woman, a self-described crack addict. A young white woman, also in for a drug-related crime, observed that “a lot of the violence is over petty things, like owing somebody a pack of cigarettes.” By contrast, and consistent with survey results, women interviewed at CIW in the 1960s rarely mentioned such problems with sharing, although some, such as this woman serving time for drug possession, noted that “you have to be careful not to be taken advantage of.”

Relations with and Perceptions of Prison Staff

The growing distrust and detachment that characterized prisoners' relations with other prisoners was paralleled by responses to some, although not all, of the survey items about staff. Women's responses to two of the statements about staff showed no change over time. In both the 1960s and the 1990s, 92% of respondents agreed that a prisoner “should stick up for what she feels is right and not let staff set her standards”; and 61% of respondents agreed that it is best not to let staff know when one is feeling down. Consistent with the overwhelming support for the first statement, interviewees in both periods also emphasized the importance of standing up for what is right, even knowing that it may get you nothing. “You tell the staff that a supervisor is wrong, you know it's a losing game, but you must anyway,” said a woman at CIW in 1963. Similarly, a pregnant woman at CIW in 1995 for sales of methamphetamines asserted, “I'll do whatever it takes when it comes to one of my rights or something in here, because we have very little rights. But what little rights we have we need to stick by them, you know?” The importance of hiding one's problems from the staff also received identical levels of support in each period, although the interviews suggest the reasons for this approach to doing time were somewhat time-specific. For women at CIW in the 1960s, keeping problems to one's self was in part due to concerns over being seen as poorly adjusted, which might then affect one's chances for release. But for women at CIW in the 1990s, hiding one's feelings was more often described as a way to neutralize “degrading and humiliating experiences,” as one Latina lifer put it. She went on to relate how she dealt with one such experience, regular strip searches: “I tell them [staff] ‘I'm so glad you're the ones who have to look up my ass.’”

The consistency across time in responses to these two statements was balanced by significant differences in responses to other statements about relations with staff. Almost three-quarters of respondents in 1998, compared to just over half in 1963, agreed that if they revealed too much about themselves to staff, staff would use this against them; and significantly more women in the 1990s also agreed that correctional officers should keep their distance when dealing with prisoners. These changes may well reflect the general trends in penal ideology and discourse, as well as the institutional changes at CIW, outlined above. As we have seen, in the 1960s prisoners at CIW were encouraged to share their feelings with staff and other prisoners in individual and group counseling sessions, and were expected to work together to solve personal and collective problems. By fostering relations of “warmth and friendliness,” the administration sought to reduce barriers between staff and prisoners.

These efforts were at least partially successful, according to interviews at CIW in the 1960s. Several women acknowledged receiving useful advice and help from at least some staff. As one lifer, recently arrived at CIW, put it, “I don't feel that I can't come to them for help. I appreciated that [advice from a WCS] and kept it in my mind. I'm going to have to turn to one of them at one time.” At the same time, and reflecting the majority view that information would be used against them, several women at CIW in the 1960s pointed to the conflict between the official emphasis on open communication and prisoners' concerns with how this might affect their appearances before the parole board. For example, as she was telling the interviewer of her intention to live with another prisoner when they left prison, a woman serving a 15-year sentence added, “I never talk to anyone on staff like I'm doing today—if the Board knew I was going to live with [her lover] on the outside, they might make me do the whole 15 years.” Such concerns were at times combined with criticism of clinical staff for lack of professionalism in the types of information they sought and how they used it. A woman serving time for prostitution complained that the psychiatrist-in-training had asked “if I reached a climax every time, what position I took, what about oral contact, how many times a night…. What business has he of asking how many times I reach a climax?…He asked my roommate these questions and she told him to mind his own business, but he wrote a bad Board report on her.”

In the 1990s, the determinate sentencing system meant that, apart from lifers, women's release dates were not affected by “bad Board reports.” Nevertheless, women at CIW in the 1990s were significantly more likely to worry about information being used against them and about correctional officers keeping their distance from prisoners. Our interviews elicited little that directly explained the former difference, beyond the virtually unanimous views that most staff could not be trusted, assumed prisoners were “lost causes” and were not interested in prisoners' well-being. As a 38-year-old serving her first prison sentence in the 1990s observed, “These people aren't willing to help you do anything. They're here to punish you and that's all.” With regard to the majority view that correctional officers needed to keep their distance from prisoners, interviews in the 1990s suggest this reflected a wariness both of other prisoners and of staff. Some, such as this 60-something lifer, believed staff were corrupted or hardened by contact with prisoners: “When they [staff] hang around with a bunch of dogs then you know they must be a dog too. So there is a lot of staff that you spend a lot of time just steering clear of.” Another lifer, a 50-year-old white woman, said, “[T]here are some staff that when you first meet them, they're very, very nice and they're caring…but they get burned so badly by the women manipulating, that they get very ugly or abusive.”

Other prisoners at CIW in the 1990s worried that staff got too close to prisoners for their own, illicit self-interests: “I mean, some staff, I think they're screwing the young ladies, the way they act. I mean, they walk into the room with the ladies and shut the doors, you know, and they've got their pets” (a 23-year-old African American woman). Concerns over correctional officers keeping their distance, as the survey data suggest, were voiced much less often by women in the 1960s and were more benign. For example, one woman remonstrated about staff members who danced on the yard or played their bongo drums with prisoners: “Staff should know their place—they're not inmates.” Again, the official emphasis on warm relationships among prisoners and staff in the 1960s doubtless at least partially accounts for the majority of prisoners disagreeing with this statement.

Finally, the statement that staff made clear their expectations about how prisoners should behave received high levels of support in both the 1960s and the 1990s (68% and 78%, respectively). The difference in support is statistically significant, but again it is one of degree and not kind. The interviews shed light on this difference. In the 1960s, as Ward and Kassebaum (1965:24) noted, prisoners often expressed frustration over “wishy-washy” staff who would not accept greater responsibility for their role as authorities and experts; and many women, when asked what they found most annoying about doing time, complained that staff were non-directive. For example, one woman bemoaned “[t]he confusion of never getting a straight answer—I don't mind strict rules if supervisors would enforce them…” By contrast, in the 1990s, with greater standardization and bureaucratization at CIW, women more often complained about the strictness of the rules and their enforcement: “There's a certain way you do things, a certain way you've gotta dress…. So your best bet is to find out from staff what is really going on. They give you a Title 15 rules book with all the rules and regulations. Everything's in there” (a Latina who had served seven months for selling drugs to an undercover officer). A Native American woman who had served time at other prisons concurred: “You got to follow their rules or they write you up….You really, really got to watch your Ps and Qs here.” Another reason more prisoners in the 1990s agreed that staff made expectations clear may be that CIW was interested and intervened in fewer aspects of their lives, compared to CIW in the 1960s. Consistent with Garland's portrayal of prison officials in the late twentieth century, CIW's administration appeared to have shifted its concerns from “depth to surface” (1995:194). The rehabilitative regime of the 1960s, in other words, gave greater scope to authoritarian and open-ended demands for normalization—demands that were not necessarily defined by explicit standards. But in the 1990s, when behavioral conformity in prison had replaced normalization as a priority, the range of ways to get into trouble or challenge the prison's authority was more constrained. Conversely, and perhaps ironically, being a good prisoner in some ways may have been easier in the 1990s compared to the 1960s, precisely because the prison expected less from its charges.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we relied on women in prison to shed light on the practices and experiences of imprisonment at two key points in the recent history of penality in the United States. Much scholarship on criminal punishment has focused on macro-level shifts in discourses and logics, or on legislation and policy, with little attention to whether and how these shifts are translated into practice or experienced by those subject to criminal punishment. But as Garland notes, “[t]he question of how prisoners engage with [imprisonment] practices and the ways in which these practices do or do not actually shape prisoners' subjectivity and behavior is…[an] issue of great importance” (1997:207).

In addressing this issue, we found that imprisonment did change and in ways that are perhaps predictable given the growing punitiveness and pessimism of the criminal justice system and the public over the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Evidence supportive of the change hypothesis can be seen in how women characterized their relations with other prisoners and staff, and how they responded to the prison regime. In the 1960s, CIW's stated goal was to provide women with an individually oriented and therapeutically informed rehabilitation program. Official discourse was optimistic about prisoners' capacities for reform and encouraged close relations among prisoners and staff. By contrast, in the 1990s penal rationalities that emphasized self-reliance and individual responsibility were more hostile to a prison social order based on collaborative relationships and familiar interactions. Prisoners did not expect to be guided toward reform by benevolent others. In official discourse, the prisoner as an economic actor had replaced the inmate, or “resident,” as a social actor who was a member of a prison community. As the prison became less ambitious in its goals and lowered its expectations of prisoners, prisoners in turn came to expect less from the prison and from each other. In a penal regime characterized by greater austerity, greater emphasis on custody and security, and less attention to individuals, prisoners appear to have responded by becoming more self-reliant, and more detached from and distrustful of other prisoners and staff.

However, women's experiences at CIW also suggest that changes in penality—in both the practices of imprisonment and who was subject to them—did not fundamentally alter how they did time or how they dealt with the problems imprisonment presented them, even though some of those problems and their responses were regime-specific. As such, we believe that the “continuity” hypothesis receives stronger support. In important respects, the ways in which women in the 1960s and 1990s managed their lives in prison and related to those around them were quite similar. In both periods, most women sought individual and private solutions to the problems imprisonment presented them, by distancing themselves from and negotiating their relations with others so as to buffer the pains of imprisonment. Even those who served time under the ostensibly more benevolent and less punitive regime of the 1960s did not, by and large, embrace or expect open and trusting relations with others. A woman who had served over 25 years at CIW captured this idea of continuity in spite of change in an interview in 1995: “…the faces have changed, the words have changed, the clothes have changed. But the way women do time has not changed that much. The way the institution offers what should be done with time and society's expectation of what happens when the person comes out has changed completely, and it's sad.”

The interviews revealed a number of other continuities in women's responses to imprisonment that space prevents us from documenting fully. For example, women in both periods almost unanimously acknowledged their need for rehabilitation, but many questioned the extent to which this could be accomplished within the prison context, whether through the prison's guidance (in the 1960s) or on their own (in the 1990s). In both periods, women noted how various routine practices of imprisonment as well as the existence of contradictory goals and conflicting logics subverted efforts at rehabilitation. And in both periods, women also questioned whether the prison had the resources and will necessary to achieve—or to allow them to achieve—rehabilitation. In this respect, our findings resonate with those of Hannah-Moffat, in her study of the federal imprisonment of women in Canada: “Prisons are governed by material structures, cultural sensibilities, and mentalities that limit the extent to which the content of a regime can be changed. Regardless of the form and content of a woman-centred regime, it is still in many respects about punishment, security and discipline” (2001:197).

The ways women responded to what they viewed as these fundamental features of imprisonment were quite similar. They rarely engaged in serious violence, racial conflict, or gang activity, even in the 1990s as the criminal justice system sent more women to CIW and “masculinized” (a term some staff and prisoners used) its regime. But if some of the more obvious and public forms of disorder and rebellion were infrequent at CIW in either period, concerted efforts to challenge power relations and subvert rules were not. For example, in the 1960s and the 1990s, women admitted to using and dealing drugs or other contraband, and to “appropriating” items from the prison for their personal use. These were characterized by prisoners in various ways: as resistance, as efforts to exercise some control in their highly restricted lives, or simply as ways of easing the pains of prison life (see also Bosworth 1999).

This suggests that while discourses, practices, and people come and go, important realities of imprisonment persist, as do certain gendered assumptions about the nature and needs of criminal women. The stabilizing influences of ideological notions of gender and of assumptions about women's criminality were an important source of continuity in both the practices and experience of imprisonment at CIW. Staff and officials in both periods shared the view that their charges were not, on the whole, dangerous or predatory, but disabled and deficient; and that female prisoners' particular needs required a gender-specific regime. These views reflected and reinforced prisoners' attitudes toward and relations with each other, which were often distrustful and suspicious, but also intimately affectionate at times.

Whether subject to the maternal, therapeutic regime of the 1960s that promoted rehabilitation through individualized treatment or to the neoliberal regime of the 1990s that shifted responsibility for rehabilitation onto prisoners, women at CIW lived with and negotiated fundamental features of imprisonment that shaped their experiences in comparable ways. Penal regimes, O'Malley (1999) argues, often incorporate elements of different and conflicting rationalities, albeit in an uneven and negotiated fashion. Our research, like others' (Lucken 1998; Lynch 1998, 2000), has shown that an apparent concern with the rehabilitation of offenders can coexist with punitive, disciplinary, and managerial preoccupations, in part because the definition and means of accomplishing rehabilitation, like many other goals of imprisonment, are not fixed. As such, changes in imprisonment over the last third of the twentieth century may best be described as a “refigurement” rather than a transformation (Garland 1995), as a continuation of a reformist project that has a long history of resurrecting and repackaging old practices under new labels and justifications.